Little Women: Lost in the Echoes
by UndomesticatedSoA
Summary: When love dies, sometimes the spirit fades away; but the body remains filled with nothing but memories.


**A/N**

**UndomesticatedSoA - Definition: A collaboration between Voracious Bitch and MuckyShroom, exploring the women of SAMCRO. Some characters are canon, some OFCs. Some situations are AU, some canon. If you want more info, just check out the bio.**

**Disclaimer: All characters, etc from Sons of Anarchy are the property of Kurt Sutter, FX, etc. We own nothing that you recognise from SoA.**

**Parental Advisory Warning: This piece contains strong language.**

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**Lost in the Echoes**

Layona made her way down the hall. As she passed the powder blue Panhead she trailed her finger from taillight to gas cap as was her custom. A small smile always passed her lips at the smooth feel of it and the flood of memories. She had spent hours watching it make its way through the world in the early years as John rode, with Gemma wrapped around him, at the head of the beast he had brought to life: Anarchy. Simple words strung together had chained tortured hearts, minds and souls. The invitation he laid at their feet had caged all the rabid, angry hardness that the world had brought to boil in him and the men he found. Together they cooled molten lava to stone, molding it to the purpose of loyalty, of brotherhood. With words and actions John had called soldiers who fell in, melding into the body that would one day be the Sons.

She'd been young, so very young in those days. Otto, her Li'l Killah, had loved John's anarchy and the raw release of a life unfettered by rules. The open road laying out under the stars, the surging power of a life lived as he pleased. Her Otto had been her world, from the moment he'd picked her up on the muggy road out of New Orleans in 1967.

She was a Southern flower; in some ways so starry eyed and naïve of the world that lay beyond the home wrapped in soft, floating moss, but for all her short life in the world she could not be considered a child. From the sanctity of her pew on Sundays she learnt of the Devil as well as the good Lord. Ripe fruit blossomed in the moist, throbbing heat. Little; even innocence could be preserved in the relentless, visceral humidity.

The ladies that drank sweet tea on the porch with her Mama had been her tutors in the subject of life and the power of her femininity, her education a contradiction in chastity and exhibitionism. The world she inhabited was governed by piety, yet oiled by Blues and moonshine; pounding spirituality was entwined with a seething sexuality. Sweltering, viscous temperatures demanded that virtuous flesh be exposed. The group of life-worn belles, imbued with coquetry, always cackled that whether you be a Baptist of a Revivalist, your Sunday hat should make the Devil jealous.

Now her soul was too desolate to remain any longer in the silent house that had sheltered every Batiste. The welcoming ground which surrounded her home now contained the bodies of her Mama as it did her Mamma before her. There was no one left to look for her. So at fifteen she had fallen in love with an outlaw and never looked back until the day she'd put him into ground. Never once had she regretted the hardness of it all, never once had she wished for a different life.

As her fingertips smoothed over the cool, familiar paintwork, the unforgiving metal imbued her with a haze of memories. She felt adrift now, like a piece of bleached wood tossed on storm darkened waves. Ever since her Li'l Killah had passed she had felt unchained. At first her soul had been bruised. For two years she had stayed away from anything male, even her dogs had been females. She had wholeheartedly avoided anything driven by testosterone, preferring her own company above all other. She prefered sitting in the their house, warmed and enfolded by her memories; listening to the music that had been the soundtrack of their life together or simply silently wallowing in the past. She kept bottles of his favourite whiskey in the house. She never drank the liquid amber, but would pour some into a glass and sit holding it tightly, breathing in the malty aroma that had once twisted around her man. She would take the essence into her, each draw of it into her lungs rekindling memories of her days on the road with Li'l, until it became more important than oxygen.

After a while the need had simply become too overwhelming. It wasn't the need for company or conversation, just the need for a male. She simply wanted the connection, the feel of skin on skin, the knowledge that for one moment in time she was not alone. For so long she had felt like a grainy mirror-image of herself, a phantasm, a shadow. In an effort to feel alive, to regain the vitality that the essence of her man had nourished, she had wound herself around anything with a rampant cock. She could close her eyes and pretend it was him; the background noise of the parties muffled the wrong voice. If she kept her eyes closed the taste of whiskey and smoke from their lips to hers fed her delusion; that it was _his _flesh, _his _cock. The rough rub of denim and the smooth sliding of leather against her skin carried the scent of her life. With her eyes tightly closed she could almost feel the wind, almost taste the embedded essence of smoke, asphalt and leather that was his aura. As long as she stayed in her own darkness the throttle calloused hands that gripped at her were the right ones.

If he could see her now... No, she couldn't go there. She'd fallen so far off the map that that they had all given up trying to pull her back. Gem, Lu, they had all had enough of her and Li'l's ghost. Sympathy had turned into confusion which had turned into anger before merging into desperation then fading into apathy. Now she was just one of the many anonymous women that populated the clubhouse for the Sons' pleasure, her ink faded and blurred with time, her name forgotten in the alcoholic riot of the post-Church Friday nights; her links to the club erased with the deaths of the men her man had once called 'friend'.


End file.
